Making the Case for Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis with LGBTGEQ+ Persons and Communities

ABSTRACT

The emergence of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) in qualitative scholarship offers a means to derive in-depth meaning attending to the complexities of lived experience. IPA extends qualitative inquiry through a double hermeneutic whereby the researcher is making sense of the experiences of participants who are making sense of a phenomenon. In this article, the authors present seminal empirical studies using IPA with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender expansive, queer communities, argue a rationale for its usefulness, discuss methodological insights and strategies, and offer potential future directions.     

Inappropriate Comparisons: The LGB Population's Missing Reference Group

ABSTRACT

Given that many professional organizations emphasize the need for comparing assessment results to appropriate reference groups in their codes of ethics, we consider this practice through an ecological perspective as it applies to the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) population. The purpose of norming and types of assessment bias is discussed with respect to LGB population, which frequently lack specific norming data. The authors discuss whether the LGB population has characteristics similar to other commonly normed for groups and explore how group-shared constructs such as minority stress and internalized homophobia may introduce bias and affect the validity of assessments. A social anxiety assessment as well as a personality disorder inventory are examined for bias as case examples explaining how these assessments may exhibit bias when used with the LGB population. Increases in validity and effects on treatment planning are discussed as benefits of providing LGB-specific norms. Risks of providing these norms, such as minimizing subgroup differences and possibly increasing the risk of discrimination are also addressed before providing clinicians with recommendations as to how they may minimize the risk of bias in their assessment process.     

Staff Development as a School Climate Intervention to Support Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students: An Integrated Research Partnership Model for School Counselors and Counselor Educators

ABSTRACT

This article posits that an integrative research partnership model can assist school counselors in addressing the marginalization of transgender students in schools through staff development. A methodological integration of action research and program evaluation through quantitative and qualitative data collection is explained, and a collaborative process is highlighted. A case example is provided to demonstrate the use of the design.     

Comparison of Two Psycho-Educational Interventions Aimed at Preventing HIV and Promoting Sexual Health Among Portuguese Women

This study compares the efficacy of 2 psychoeducational interventions—ACCENT skills-based and didactic information only—to prevent HIV among Portuguese women. At posttest and follow-up, participants in both intervention groups (n = 127) were more knowledgeable about HIV than at baseline. Although both intervention groups showed an increase in self-reported condom use over time, differences were marginally stronger in the ACCENT group. Both intervention groups showed more positive results than the non-intervention control group (n = 33). The study suggests that HIV prevention interventions can produce significant changes when they target a set of knowledge, social, and cognitive variables relevant to sexual behavior change.     

Influence of Female Genital Cutting on Sexual Experience in Southern Ethiopia

Female genital cutting (FGC) is a persistent social norm in the Liben district of southern Ethiopia. This study explores whether the sexual experiences of married men and women differ by women's FGC status. Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 28 women with different types of FGC (or no FGC) and 21 husbands. Compared to others, women with more severe FGC reported traumatic sexual experiences and decreased sexual desire. Nonetheless, participants largely endorsed FGC for daughters, revealing pressure to maintain the practice. Opportunities for change exist, as women and men recognized the sexual pleasure and healthy birth experiences of uncut women.     

Sociopolitical and Cultural Correlates of Internalized Homonegativity in Gay and Bisexual Men: Findings from a Global Study

Objectives: Based on the premise that internalized homonegativity (IH) is a product of the incorporation of environmental heterosexism, the authors examined the influence of sociopolitical and individual influences on IH. Methods: The cross-sectional study consisted of 109,382 gay and bisexual men across 77 countries. Results: Variables at the (European) country-level that were associated with higher levels of IH included lack of laws recognizing same-sex relationships and perceived and actual negative gay-related public opinion about homosexuals. Individual-level variables significantly associated with IH were public opinion about homosexuals and exposure to gay-related victimization/discrimination. Conclusions: An improved sociopolitical climate for LGB individuals is needed.     

The Impact of HIV Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) Use on the Sexual Health of Men Who Have Sex with Men: A Qualitative Study in Seattle,WA

This study explores the impacts of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) use on the sexual health of men who have sex with men (MSM). The authors conducted in-depth interviews with MSM who use PrEP (n = 14). Data was analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. PrEP use reduced fear and shame associated with sex and facilitated greater sexual satisfaction and intimacy. Although participants generally viewed PrEP as empowering and beneficial, they also experienced PrEP-related stigma. The authors’ analysis emphasizes the importance of understanding the reasons MSM use PrEP and highlights opportunities for reducing harm and fostering sexual health among MSM who are using or considering PrEP.     

Monitoring the parameter vector of regression models with time-to-event response in phase II processes

In most of the existing specialized literature, monitoring regression models are a special case of profile monitoring. However, not every regression model always represents appropriately a profile data structure. This is clearly the case of the Weibull regression model (WRM) with common shape parameter γ. Even though it might be thought that existing methodologies (especially likelihood-ratio (LRT)-based methods) for monitoring generalized linear profiles can also be successfully applied to monitoring regression models with time-to-event response, it will be shown in this paper that those methodologies work fairly acceptable just for data structures with 1000 observations at least approximately. It was found out that some corrections, often referred to as Bartlett's adjustments, are needed to be implemented in order to improve the accuracy of using the asymptotic distributional properties of the LRT statistic for carrying out the monitoring of WRM with relatively small and moderate dimensions of the available datasets. Simulation studies suggest that the use of the aforementioned corrections make the resulting charts work quite acceptable when available data structures contain 30 observations at least. Detection abilities of the proposed schemes improve as dataset dimension increases.     

Flexible Tweedie regression models for continuous data

Tweedie regression models (TRMs) provide a flexible family of distributions to deal with non-negative right-skewed data and can handle continuous data with probability mass at zero. Estimation and inference of TRMs based on the maximum likelihood (ML) method are challenged by the presence of an infinity sum in the probability function and non-trivial restrictions on the power parameter space. In this paper, we propose two approaches for fitting TRMs, namely quasi-likelihood (QML) and pseudo-likelihood (PML). We discuss their asymptotic properties and perform simulation studies to compare our methods with the ML method. We show that the QML method provides asymptotically efficient estimation for regression parameters. Simulation studies showed that the QML and PML approaches present estimates, standard errors and coverage rates similar to the ML method. Furthermore, the second-moment assumptions required by the QML and PML methods enable us to extend the TRMs to the class of quasi-TRMs in Wedderburn's style. It allows to eliminate the non-trivial restriction on the power parameter space, and thus provides a flexible regression model to deal with continuous data. We provide an R implementation and illustrate the application of TRMs using three data sets.